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LXer Weekly Roundup for 11-Dec-2011

In this week's Roundup we have another dagger in the heart of the desktop proclaimed, the Mozilla - Google deal still lives, a cool developerWorks article on shells in Linux, HP to contribute webOS to FOSS, Glyn moody and the Open Source TCO as well as the late addition of a LXer Feature entitled "Gnome 3, Try 3". Enjoy!

Mozilla's Google Deal is NOT Dead: From the 'Don't always believe what you read' files: There has been some 'confusion' in recent days about the status of Mozilla's relationship with Google. Some have speculated (incorrectly) that the deal is over, leaving Mozilla without its chief source of revenue.

Suicide By Silverlight?: It's obvious that the MPAA has their greasy hands all over this decision, and there is probably little doubt that any licensing agreement between LoveFilms and the content owners was contingent upon them switching over to Silverlight. Duh....I figured that all out on my own

Zittrain in Technology Review: The personal computer is dead: The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

Gnome 3 Will Bring Users Back To Ubuntu: Top 6 Gnome Extensions: Gnome 3 extensions have breathed a new life in those disgruntled Ubuntu users who were looking elsewhere due to the lack of customisation of Unity. The rating jump that LinuxMint enjoyed on Distrowatch was a strong indicator which some Ubuntu fans tried to shot down as 'useless'. I don't want to get into that, I have already wrote about it. Unity may work perfectly fine for a majority of users, especially if you are using a netbook with tiny screen. For, those who are looking elsewhere due to lack of customisation of Unity, don't worry. Now, you can customise your Ubuntu and get back to work.Here are the top 6 extensions that I am using on Ubuntu and have started loving it again. It's the best of both worlds -- stability and power of Debian (with PPA) with customisation of Gnome 3 shell.

Evolution of shells in Linux: Pointing and clicking is fine for most day-to-day computing tasks, but to really take advantage of the strengths of Linux over other environments, you eventually need to crack the shell and enter the command line. Lots of command shells are available, from Bash and Korn to C shell and various exotic and strange shells. Learn which shell is right for you.

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source: HP plans to continue to be active in the development and support of webOS. By combining the innovative webOS platform with the development power of the open source community, there is the opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.

Open Source Total Cost of Ownership 2.0: Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called "A Brief History of Microsoft FUD". This ran through successive attempts by Microsoft to dismiss GNU/Linux in various ways. One of the better-known was a series of "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) studies. By an amazing coincidence, these all showed that Microsoft Windows was cheaper than that supposedly cheap GNU/Linux. Fortunately, people soon cottoned on to the fact that these studies, paid for by Microsoft, were pretty worthless (here, for example, is a great debunking of the kind of FUD that was being put out in 2005.) However, one knock-on consequence of that episode is that TCO studies rather fell from favour. So it's interesting to see this new report prepared for the Cabinet Office with the title "Total Cost of Ownership of Open Source Software", which has been released under the liberal Open Government Licence for public sector information.

Gnome 3, Try 3: I just finished my third try with gnome 3. This time was the longest. I spent the month of November using it daily.